This is the Memory Palace.
I'm Nate DeMaio.
A flyer wheat pasted to a plywood fence around a construction site or stable gun to an events board in a college town or slipped under a windshield wiper or handed out in a street corner.
In 1993, I was 19.
I was driving across country in the 1985 Chevy Chevette light blue with my friend Jen from high school.
I wanted to have my car out at college in Santa Barbara.
She wanted to see someone in Sonoma, but mostly it just sounded fun to her.
And so we set out one summer morning from Providence, a full tank of gas, some snacks,
a bunch of CDs, digable planets hitting as we hit the on ramp to the George Washington Bridge.
My plan was to make it to DC by nightfall and walk around a bit.
Then we'd head off and stay in some AAA approved motel in Virginia somewhere, however far we got.
It seemed like what one should do at the start of one's first cross-country drive.
Felt very American.
We'd already listened to America by Simon and Garfunkel
while counting the cars in the New Jersey Turnbike and Fugazi and Rites of Spring
as we looked for parking near the National Mall.
And the Washington Monument went from a sunset peach to a matte white and then shone in the floodlights in the night and it was beautiful.
It was good to be there.
It was a good idea.
We walked around in the dark among the monuments and the tourists, our fellow Americans.